I am the one who said that the postgresql I was using didn't act like any
other one I have used before. Nothing seemed to fix it. Then I performed ls
-C only to get a single column. So something really bad had happened. I
reloaded Ubuntu 24.04 and now postgresql and ls are performing as
advertised. I don't know what I did to my machine but it seemed totally
messed up before I reloaded it. I am so glad that I have a very good files
backup system. Thanks to all that replied to my first post.
Sherman